Hacker Contest Won't End Music Debate

Benny Evangelista, Chronicle Staff Writer

Published 4:00 am, Monday, October 16, 2000

About a month ago, a coalition of record industry and technology companies challenged computer hackers around the world to try to crack six programs designed to keep digital music out of the hands of pirates.

In just three weeks, hackers came up with 447 possible ways to crack the Secure Digital Music Initiative's music protection technologies. And that number could have been greater because an unknown number of hackers boycotted the contest.

The challenge represents part of a campaign by the recording industry to come up with technologies to block people from downloading copyrighted music without paying.

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But critics believe the results of the contest will show no technology can completely stop music fans from trading and downloading songs in the age of Napster and MP3s.

"Anyone interested in promoting music should look at inventing new business models instead of trying to beat on technology companies to look for a magical solution," said Mountain View's Don Marti, who led the boycott against the SDMI contest.

The SDMI is a consortium of nearly 200 record industry and technology companies. It was formed to create technological standards that would allow music to be downloaded from the Internet and played on portable digital audio devices while protecting copyrights and royalties owned by record labels and artists.

The SDMI was created in December 1998 to respond to the growing threat from free MP3 songs posted and traded on the Internet. Eight months later, Napster Inc. of Redwood City released its online music file sharing program that has made MP3 trading almost a national past time.

For the contest, the SDMI proposed six technologies that can be used to embed music with codes that prevent songs from being illegally copied. To test these codes, the group launched a "Hack SDMI" challenge in September, offering $60,000 in prize money to hackers who successfully cracked the codes.

SDMI Executive Director Leonardo Chiariglione said it's too soon to tell whether any of the entries successfully cracked the codes and copied the music.

Still, the hacker community has given the SDMI "extremely valuable information" to improve its defense system, Chiariglione said.

Marti, technical editor of the Linux Journal magazine, said he boycotted the contest because he did not want computer programmers to help what he called the record industry's "plan to seize total control over recorded music from the customer."

"I insist on my right to use copyrighted material I buy in accordance with the traditional rights of a music customer," Marti wrote in his call for a boycott. "I will not help test programs or devices that violate privacy or interfere with the right of fair use."

The tag would be the digital equivalent to a universal bar code that would invisibly provide data about each song, such as names of artist, song writers, producers or record labels that own royalty rights.

RIAA General Counsel Cary Sherman said the tag is not designed to prevent music from being pirated, just help the industry keep track of songs downloaded via the Internet.

But analyst Malcolm Maclachlan of International Data Corp. said such identification tags "are irrelevant as long as Napster is around." ..